


Mouth Full of Blood

by tallykale



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, Possession, i mean this is fiddauthor if you squint but i'm not going to bother tagging it really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-03
Updated: 2015-10-03
Packaged: 2018-04-24 13:17:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4921105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tallykale/pseuds/tallykale
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When he wakes up, there’s a metallic tang in his overcrowded mouth, and his head has never felt so painfully empty.</p>
<p>Or, possession is an ugly word, and Bill shies away from it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mouth Full of Blood

Bill makes a point to never go into too much detail about what he needs Ford’s body for, but he’s grown used to blood on his clothes and at the corners of his mouth and on his newly calloused hands. Less common are shallow scratches across his fingers and neck and chest, or bruises blooming like flowers, dull-hued spreading over his broad shoulders, and once or twice the deep-seated ache of a broken bone somewhere inside his abdomen– but nothing like this.

When he wakes up, there’s a metallic tang in his overcrowded mouth, and his head has never felt so painfully empty.

It’s normal for him to have something extra, by now—a finger, a mind—and he thinks blankly for a moment that maybe this is how things work for him, extras and spares and too many until the rest of him doesn’t exist, and then he shakes his head and takes inventory. He can feel all of his limbs ( _always a positive_ , calls something sardonic from the back of his mind, and he thrills for a moment; it’s only his own thoughts estimating what Bill might have said, though, not another presence), his clothes are tattered—maybe more than when he closed his eyes, maybe not—but the holes and scratches are edged with blood (he’s never been in front of a body when he wakes up so he reasons that it’s not worth thinking on, and Bill always takes that reasoning and encourages it with honey and flattery, and why would he lie?), and the only sources of pain are a stinging across the tips of his fingers (twelve, none broken, none missing, none gained) and that odd throbbing that thrums into his gums and jaw like the vibrations of a voice.

And the hollowness in his head. That hurts, nearly more than he can bear.

But that’s not the priority: once again that taste of solitude is folded behind his eyes and ignored for the moment, in favour of cleaning his wounds and—the world is off-kilter for a moment as he pulls his taut muscles to sit up, and things are even blurrier than the ordinary astigmatism prescribes—finding his glasses. They’re on the floor (they always are, Bill wouldn’t  _really_  lose them, he thinks, even if he doesn’t actually need them—slit pupils focus easily on what’s important) and he fumbles them onto his face—and stops, fingers trembling an inch from his cheeks (still tacky with blood and dirt, like always, and there’s no point in asking why). It’s a piece of reality still out of place, maybe, or a trick of the light, prismatic scattering from the triangle in the window.

Each finger on his too-wide palm, adorned with a claw like some twisted crown. (White, underneath the blood, he notes. Sharp. Slightly curved. Smooth. He categorises, examines, tries to understand.) They curl from his cuticles like natural things, as if they’d always been there.

He turns his hands, wonderingly, reverently, but now holding them at a distance; syrup-thick blood gathers at the tip of a claw— _his_ claw, and falls, slow-motion reality, to disappear into the existing stain on his coat. Pain still pricks at his nail beds, but awareness of its cause lets him ignore it: another discomfort filed away in those corridors of his mind that used to be private. (Bill knows his misgivings, he thinks, of  _course_  he does, it’s just that he’s considerate enough to gloss over them, pretend that he can’t read a mind like so many open journals.) That scattered sting swept aside, and his hands (doubly abnormal now, he sneers to himself) sufficiently examined for now, he notices again the feeling of uncomfortable fullness in his mouth and the way his gums and jaw seem to vibrate with some unnatural rhythm. He shuts his eyes tightly for a moment, steels himself: stands up in one movement and clutches at the desk beside him for support, still trembling, still tender.

Six steps across the room to the full-length mirror, and he can see himself clearly. There’s more blood on his clothes than he’d thought, and most of it is still wet and shiny—he swallows something, but isn’t sure whether it’s vomit or a smile that’s caught in his throat. The light in the room is tinged red, from sunset or sunrise (it’s hard to know, these days, he can’t tell the time instinctively anymore—but he can feel  _other_  things now: how close a heartbeat is, the angle he’d have to bend his fingers at to break them, the exact temperature of blood under skin), and it makes his reflection dizzyingly crimson.

He doesn’t want to open his mouth. (He casts inwards, for a moment, wanting answers—his head is still empty, and he doesn’t know how that makes him feel.)  His hands are in loose fists at his sides, held just so that those claws press against his palm, but not enough to break the skin; unwillingly, almost, he brings a hand to his face, to his mouth, to his lips, and pulls them apart with the fear of wild things.

Canines: elongated, drawn to a feral point. Without stretching his cheek further, he can already tell that there’s more teeth rooted in his mouth than there were when he last closed his eyes and Bill reopened them. Blood and saliva fill the narrow gaps between his teeth (fangs, he thinks, keeping in a gut-wrenching theme with the claws) and his breath is hot and shallow from panic. Part of him wants to laugh, and cry, and hold his fists to his chest until his claws break through and wake him up; another part of him is already trying to remember where he left his knife. He laughs once, humourlessly, more of a shaky exhale than anything else, and turns towards the door. He doesn’t look at his hands again.

***

He cuts his nails back to the quick. He pulls out teeth (one-two-three dizzy from the pain). He grinds down the canines as well as he can. He falls into bed and asks for dreamless sleep.

***

Bill, of course, doesn’t listen.

The landscape of his dreams is as abstract as ever, drawing on his half-remembered memories and half-formed fears to create a patchwork landscape; this time, it manifests as his house, twisted, opening onto a subtly moving plain that he recognises with a turn in his stomach as flesh. A jagged tooth juts out from the ground like a mockery of a mountain; Ford deliberately looks away from it and sits on the border between broken wood and skin, adopting a guarded pose as he awaits the arrival he knows is coming.

“Stanford!” A voice rings through his dream (it’s grating, he realises with a frown, and not as honeyed as he once thought it was) and echoes back upon itself, while a section of the dull sky inverts and coalesces into that familiar shape. Bill always seems faintly comical against a backdrop of semi-reality, all bright lemon yellow and simplistic lines and angles, but Ford has experience dealing with first impressions. (He knows that Bill is more than he appears. He knows that Bill knows  _lots_  of things.) A triangle of air resolves itself into the muse’s form, and a void-black hand plucks the symbol of a top hat from within his geometric body. Bill hovers: his eye is knowing, and meets his gaze with almost-sympathy (he’s not human, emotions don’t really mean anything to him; it’s false, but he still lets himself believe it for another day). Ford stands up, refusing to let his fear and betrayal and  _hurt_  show, and says nothing. The silence stretches between them, thick as blood on claws–

“Now, I bet you have some questions for me. Hey, you’re probably angry, even– but first, answer me  _this_ , Sixer: did you miss me?” Bill’s voice is confident, and he jauntily crosses his legs as he speaks; Ford is momentarily taken aback at the subversion, and nearly takes that extra leap into suspicion, but settles back into uneasy acquiescence. Bill is open to talking about this. Ford’s never thought to doubt his motivations before now, really, and so this is no different. They can discuss, and understand, and move on– together, as always.

“I… yes. It was– it hurt, when I woke up and you weren’t there. I’m used to you being with me, at least in the background, so I– I probably overreacted.” Maybe he’s too eager to look for excuses for Bill, he thinks. (Maybe he’s deluding himself. Maybe he’s nothing special. Maybe he wants so desperately for someone to approve of him,  _want_  him, that he’ll–) “But I still want to know–  _what_ … why was I–”

Bill interrupts him with a gesture and is suddenly at his shoulder, tapping the back of one six-fingered hand with his cane. “Nothing wrong with them now, is there? You’re a resourceful one, and adaptable, too! Someone else might not have been able to deal with waking up to something so  _different_ ,” that overly cheerful voice blares, too loud, next to his ear. (His hands, his mouth– they look and feel untouched in his dream, and that opens a space for Bill’s words to slide in and curl around his fears and questions, and subdue them.) “You can handle things that send normal people running for the hills, Stanford. If you  _really_  want to know the mechanics of it, I can tell you– it’s pretty simple, honestly, probably beneath you.” A single eye, half-lidded, meets both of his, and he feels his mouth forming an agreement (yes, Bill, you’re so smart, Bill, I’m so  _grateful_ , Bill), but he bites his tongue and swallows it, to rest with all the other things he’s almost let himself say.

“I just want to know… the basics. Mostly  _why_ –” his voice catches as the memory of hot iron-tang blood fills his mouth. “Why it happened. Why my body was… changed.” To him, his own voice sounds meek, submissive: fitting into the cracks in Bill’s, making an unbalanced and jagged thing that he can’t bring himself to break apart. “Is it going to happen again?”

“Well–  _essentially_ , it comes down to the fact that  _you’re_  mortal, and  _I’m_ – well, that’s a whole other story! Anyway, I can only interact with the ‘real world’–” he pauses to mime air quotes, and his voice sours sarcastic– “when someone like you opens a connection with me! But at your core, your body is just a body, and it really isn’t equipped to contain something like me– so it does its best to…  _adapt_! It’s temporary, mostly, unless I stay longer: I just lost track of time, to be honest!” Bill ruffles his hair, sending a shiver down Ford’s spine and blood to his face. “Don’t worry your pretty little head about it, Stanford. Look at it this way: you deal with  _way_  weirder stuff every day! If you can handle that, you can handle this– right?” Something in his voice implores Ford to agree with him again, fall into his words and forget about this (until it happens again, or the blood gets too much, or someone–  _someone_ gets hurt.) It’s so easy to let the tension in his hands and jaw slip away– and so he does, and he nods and murmurs affirmatives and smiles shyly at Bill, not thinking about the way the muse dodged most of his question, or how he never  _has_  talked about what he needs Ford’s body for. He lets Bill direct the conversation, and they talk (he can’t quite remember what they talk about, sometimes, or whether it was important– it can’t be, if Bill never presses the issue) until morning, and it’s only when his companion has taken a dramatic and surreal exit (there was fire, he thinks, but he wasn’t quite paying attention) that he allows his smile to drop.

He wakes up feeling unsatisfied, but at least there’s nothing extra this time.

***

“Stanford, you’re getting blood all on the pages,” Fiddleford says, clipped syllables spilling into the empty space between them over the kitchen table. He’s also getting blood on the tablecloth, and the crockery, and the pancakes besides, but it takes all the softness Fiddleford has inside of him to not mention those, or anything else he might want to say.  _It feels like I’m losing you, Stanford. I’m having second thoughts, third, fourth, thousandth thoughts about this project, Stanford. Sometimes I look at you and your eyes scare me, Stanford. Isn’t that so weird, haha, now what do you want on your pancakes this morning, Stanford?_ All of it held behind his teeth. He puts his fork down on his empty plate with too much force, maybe, and looks across at his companion’s untouched food for too long, definitely.

Stanford doesn’t say anything for a long moment, gaze fixed on the journal. Always, always the journal. “Mm. Yes. What?” The blood falls from his mouth when he talks, and from the collar of his shirt as well. That’s normal enough, for Stanford, he guesses. He breathes, measures it. Counts the seconds between each drip.

“On the pages. You’re bleeding, and I won’t ask why, or how, just like I won’t ask what you’re writing–” Ford pulls the journal a little closer, the corner of it stutter-catching on the tablecloth and making the movement so much more obvious, so much more  _final_ , and Fiddleford’s voice breaks with the strain of not looking– “but I can’t  _not_  worry about you, Stanford, not when you’re spending half your time bleeding all over everything and the rest of it with–” (a demon, the words hang dangerously in the air) “ _him_ , and I– don’t know what I’m supposed to do anymore.” He’s risen to a stand while talking, knuckles white tangled in the triangle-patterned tablecloth. The silence (but not really, because the kettle is on the boil and there’s birds outside and there’s blood dripping onto his nice china plates) feels sour, somehow, and he immediately wants to step back and catch the words before they’re real in the air. “And are you going to eat those or not, because pancakes don’t freeze well and I’d rather know if you want something else since I need to go into town anyway, so I can pick you up something from the diner instead, if you’d like.”

Drip. Blood and maple syrup don’t mix. It pools around the edges of the plate instead.

“I’m… not hungry.” The words come out thicker than they should be, and Stanford very carefully avoids opening his mouth more than necessary, but even that short sentence shows his teeth, and his gums, and his tongue, and they’re so red and tender that most of Fiddleford’s anger goes out of him. “I– I want to tell you, Fids, I  _do_ –” he takes a great shudder of a breath and all his walls seem to disappear in an instant and he’s not quite crying, not yet; he brings his hands to his face and presses his fingers into his eyes. Fiddleford can see the spots of blood that well up at the cuticles and the marks from a knife around cut and bitten nails, and he opens his mouth to ask, but Stanford cuts over him, opens that crooked mouth again. “It’s Bill.” (Of course, of course,  _of course_  it is.) “But– don’t worry about it, Fids. It’ll be okay.” (It won’t, it won’t, it’s never okay and they both know it.) He lowers his hands, shaking. “I’m sorry. For shutting you out, and not telling you everything– I promise I’ll be okay.” He smiles, uncertain, as he says it, and Fiddleford can see the empty roots at the back of his mouth, and the blood that still runs thick between his teeth, and the rawness of his canines, but he nods anyway.

“I trust you, Stanford. I just– it’s hard, sometimes, when you’re all distant.” He makes some feeble gesture with his hands, and brings them to rest on the clean part of the tablecloth between them. “We can still go to the diner, if you want. As long as you wash out your mouth first.” Stanford’s hands find their way to Fiddleford’s, and they stay there for a while. Someone’s mouth fills up with blood, someone’s mouth fills up with doubt. But they both stand up and smile and keep their little fingers bent together out the door, and they both look at each other genuinely, and the blood congeals into something manageable, and they manage.

***

It’s easy, he thinks, to pretend a demon is a muse when it’s not in your blood and bones and hands; or maybe that’s when he tries his hardest to find another name for it— _possession_ , Fiddleford hisses to him after a day he doesn’t remember except for in glimpses (a bloodied six-fingered hand splayed in what should be a joint-creaking position, a grin stretched too wide in the mirror like the skin of an overripe fruit, something like fear but he can’t recognise it through these eyes), and he doesn’t answer, but thinks about the unfurling doubt in the corner of his mind, and for the first time wants to hide it.

But Stanford Pines, patron saint of extras and crowded places, has never known when to say  _enough_ : he opens his mind (again) and lets Bill in (again, again) and pretends not to see the blood (always, and the pain, as well). 


End file.
